Mr Bond remembered the creeper clinging beneath his window, and as soon as possible he was floundering, scrambling, slipping down to the house-shadowed garden below. Puffing out his cheeks, he hurried onward, while the thuds of the axe grew fainter in his ears. Brickbats lay in his path, a zinc tub wrenched at his cape and ripped it loudly, an iron hoop caught in his foot and he tottered forward with outstretched hands. And now, still running in the far-flung shadow of the house, he was on the tufted grass, whimpering a little, struggling against desire to look back over his shoulder, making for the forest that lay in the full beams of the moonlight. He tried to think, and could think of nothing but the size and safety of the shadow on which he was running. He reached the roof of the inn at last: plunged aside from his course of flight: and now he was running up the monstrous shadow of the chimney, thinking of nothing at all because the forest stood so near. Blindingly, a moon-filled avenue stretched before him: the chimney entered the chasm, and stopped: and it was as though Mr Bond were a puff of smoke blowing into the forest depths. His shadow, swinging its monstrously distorted garments, led him to an open space at the end of the avenue. The thick-set trees encircled it with silence deeper than any that Mr Bond had known. Here, in this glade, hung silence within a silence. Yet, halting abruptly, and pressing the flat of his hands to his ribs in the pain of his sudden burst of breathing, Mr Bond had no ears for the silence, nor eyes for anything beyond the scene that faced him in the centre of the forest glade: a group of upright posts, or stakes, set in a concave semicircle, throwing long shadows, and bearing on each summit a human skull. ‘The Traveller’s Head, The Headless Man,’ he whispered, stricken with terror, whipping his back on the skulls: and there was Stephen Sasserach in silhouette, leaping up the avenue, brandishing his axe as though he were a demented wood-cutter coming to cut down trees.
The traveller’s mind continued to run swiftly through the names of the three inns. ‘The Traveller’s Head,’ he thought, ‘The Headless Man, The Rest of the Traveller.’ He remembered the carrier pigeons that had flown ahead of him from inn to inn; he remembered the dust on the front of Martin’s coat. . . .
He was staring at the figure in the soiled blue shirt. It had halted now, as still as a tree, on the verge of the moon-filled glade: but the whirling thoughts of Mr Bond were on the verge of light more blinding than this; they stopped, appalled: and the traveller fled beyond the skulls, fruitlessly searching for covert in the farthest wall of trees.
Then Stephen sprang in his wake, flinging up a cry that went knocking against the tree-trunks.
The echoes were echoed by Mr Bond, who, whipping round to face his enemy, was wriggling and jerking in his Inverness cape, slipping it off at last, and swinging it in his hand, for his blood was up. And now he was deep in mortal combat, wielding his Inverness as the gladiators used to wield their nets in the old arenas. Time and again the axe and the cape engaged each other; the one warding and hindering; the other catching and ripping, clumsily enough, as though in sport. Around the skulls the two men fought and panted, now in darkness, now in the full light pouring down the avenue. Their moon-cast shadows fought another fight together, wilder still than theirs. Then Stephen cried: ‘Enough of this!’ and bared his teeth for the first time since the strife had started.
‘B-but you’re my friend!’ bleated Mr Bond; and he stared at the shining thread of the axe.
‘The best you ever had, sir, Mr Bond, sir!’ answered Stephen Sasserach; and, stepping back, the landlord of The Traveller’s Head cut off the traveller’s head.
***
The thump of the head on the sticks and leaves and grass of the forest glade was the first sound in the new and peaceful life of Mr Bond, and he did not hear it; but to the brothers Sasserach it was a promise of life itself, a signal that all was ready now for them to apply their respective talents busily and happily in the immediate future.
Stephen took the head of Mr Bond, and with gentle though rather clumsy fingers pared it to a skull, grinning back at it with simple satisfaction when the deed was over, and after that he set it up as a fine mark for his brood of primitives, the game’s endeavour being to see who could throw the ball into the eye-sockets; and to his brother Martin, landlord of The Headless Man, he sent the headless man, under the care of Stennet: and Martin, on a soft, autumnal day, reduced the headless body to a skeleton, with all its troubles gone, and through the days and nights he sat at work, with swift precision in his fingers, carving and turning, powdering his coat with dust, creating his figures and trinkets, his paper-knives and salad-spoons and fretted boxes and rare chess-men; and to his brother Crispin, landlord of The Rest of the Traveller, Martin sent the rest of the traveller, the soft and yielding parts, the scraps, the odds and ends, the miscellaneous pieces, all the internal lumber that had gone to fill the skin of the man from the Midlands and to help to render him in middle years a prey to dyspepsia. Crispin received the parcel with a pursing of his small mouth, and a call to Myrtle in his clear falsetto: ‘Stennet’s here!’
She answered from the kitchen. ‘Thank you, Cris!’ Her hands were soft and swollen as she scoured the tureen. The back of the inn was full of reflected sunlight, and her dark hair shone.
‘It’s too late in the season now,’ she said, when teatime came. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll have another one before the spring.’
Yet she was wrong. That very evening, when the moon had risen from beyond the valley, Myrtle murmured: ‘There he comes,’ and continued to stir her ladle in the bowl.
Her husband strolled into the hall, and wound the clock.
He took the lamp from its bracket on the wall.
He went to the door, and flung it open to the moonlight, holding the lamp above his head.
‘Come in, come in,’ he said, to the stranger standing there; ‘she is cooking a lovely broth tonight!’
Stanley Hutchinson
I
WELL, Mr Bidmead had a sow. And she waun’t no ordinary sow, for all that she spent her time grunting and wallering in the mire; but there was summat about those eyes of her’n, a sparkle, a ‘by yer leave’, an ‘after you’, as ain’t gener’ly to be found in sties. And it was onny reasonable to suppose that these fine manners might reveal theirselves later on in the liddle porkers that were gathered around her when the story began; it was whispered all over the place how the fat things should ought to grow up into swine of a special grandeur, seeing that their father was hisself a well-mannered hog, though his ways was less dentical than their mother’s, I reckon. So one day-morning, Mr Bidmead waun’t terrible surprised when one of the liddle fellers, whose age at that time must a been somewhere in the neighbourhood of six weeks or thereabout, walked up to the cottage, poked his snout round the door-jamb, and offered him, in the purtiest manner possible, the time of day.
‘Talkin’,’ said Mr Bidmead. ‘Now, ain’t that very nice?’ Whereupon he invited the liddle chap to dinner, and they got chatting and laughing together, and after an hour or so the old man asked him how his name was called, and it turned out to be Stanley Hutchinson.
‘I knowed some Hutchinsons once, lived over in Chailey,’ said Mr Bidmead; ‘big chep, five darters, lost his wife in a railway accident. Took on the “Green Cross” when her feyther died.’
‘’Tain’t those Hutchinsons,’ said the liddle pig, turning up his snout. Presently Mr Bidmead brought out the elderberry wine; and from that day onward the old man did all that lay in his power to make that pig happy. Cooked him flour and water puddings; pushed up a rushbottomed chair for his own using; read him bits out of the daily papers, or kept him supplied with the current prices of pork. And at night-time they’d have out the cribbage cards, or maybe the backgammon board, and the bottle of elderberry wine would stand betwixt um; then ’twas that Mr Hutchinson, after a few glasses, would come up with the funniest tales that you ever heard, or astound that old man with some of his clever tricks with matches. And last thing of all, when their eyes was so sleepy that they didn’t
know whatsumdever to do with um, they’d go slapping up to bed, and Mr Bidmead would lay awake for whole hours listening to Stanley Hutchinson snoring in the room opposite his’n, for he was a lonely man.
There never was a more eddicated pig than Stanley Hutchinson; and people used to come on foot and on horse-back, in pony-traps and in farm-carts, from Houghton, and Madehurst, and Halnaker, and from beyond Ammerley, and from beyond Heyshott, to crack their jokes with him.
Now it came to pass, that what with the extra food and drink and other expenses, Mr Bidmead found hisself one day at the end of all his money. The thought worrited him, as you can imagine; looking towards Mr Hutchinson, he couldn’t hardly contrive to keep back his tears. So within three days he had decided that the onny thing to be done, the onny thing, was to go selling Stanley Hutchinson’s relations for what they would fetch. Off he went to Tom Garrett, the carrier. ‘Lookee now, Tom Garr’tt,’ said he. And so it was all arranged how the whole stock should be taken to Arundel in time for next market day.
Eh, dear oh me, that was a terrible sad parting. When Stanley Hutchinson learnt what was in the wind, he crept up to Mr Bidmead’s bedroom, and searched for a hankercher in a drawer; and by Job, there he found a golden coin, bright gold it was, with nicks upon it as sharp as new. And directly he see it, he thought how he’d like to swaller it, for in spite of all his eddication, in spite of his fine manners, in spite of everything, Stanley Hutchinson at heart was nothing but a pig. And then his eddication got the better of him, and he thought how he’d give it a liddle lick; so he give it a liddle lick; and then he wrapped it up in the hankercher, and took it downstairs, and blowed his snout in the garden.
But he was a brave feller; and after a stroll or two up the paths, and over the flower-beds, he began to see how Mr Bidmead’s plan was all for the best. So he said to hisself: ‘Lookee, Stan, lookee here, me pig, there’s no hem use worritin’ like a engineer;’ and as soon as ever the old man had got his back turned, by Job, Stanley took his mother aside, and gave her the golden coin, telling her how it would keep her rich and contented during her last days—for she guessed exactly what was laid up for her in the time to come, surelye. With that the old sow swallered the golden coin, a sovereign it was, and good money; and when she turned back to the cart that was to take her and the children to Arundel, there was such an ‘after you’ look in her eyes that Stanley Hutchinson reckoned he hadn’t ever felt so proud of her in his whole life. ‘Gee up!’ he cried. So the young porkers scrambled in first, while their brother looked up from the road and wished um goodbye.
‘Goo’-bye, Elsie. Goo’-bye, Syd.’ So it went round. ‘Goo’-bye, Feyther. Give my love to Ethel.’ For it was let on to the children how they were all going off to spend a few days with some cousins that they had never seen. ‘Goo’-bye, Mother darlin’,’ said the liddle pig.
And so they all went away, and got killed.
II
That evening, when Mr Bidmead and the pig were halfway through their game of cribbage, they put up the cards and turned their faces to the wood fire. ‘ ’Tain’t no go,’ said the old man softly, thinking of the fine mess that he had got hisself into; and after trying him with some clever tricks with matches, Mr Hutchinson thought the same.
So they went to bed; and on the following morning it was no different; dull voices, flat feet, and looks that waun’t no better than a rush-light. But just as he was passing Stanley the sweet whey butter, all of a sudden the old man give out a great cry, fit to blow the whole of Slindon village off the top of the hill.
‘Why, by Job!’ he hollered, ‘if I bain’t the biggest fool that ever was borned!’ And with that, he started to walk up and down the parlour, now this way, now that way, up and down the parlour he walked, with his hands behind him, and his eyes growing rounder every minute.
‘What’s wrong with ’ee now?’ asked the liddle pig.
‘Hoy, there’s nothin’ wrong at all!’ cried Mr Bidmead, ‘everything’s right—eh, lawk-a-mussy-me!’ he shouted, grinning from ear to ear, ‘it queers me why I didn’t think an’t before!’ Whereupon the old chap began to sniffle as loud as he could.
‘I jest be g’wine to git a pocket-hankercher, Mus Hutchinson,’ said he.
‘There’s nothin’ like um,’ said the liddle pig. But Mr Bidmead onny sniffed the louder, strutted up and down the parlour, and winked as though he’d never stop. ‘To git a pocket-hankercher,’ he kept on repeating, clasping his bony hands together: then all of a sudden the old man couldn’t keep it up a moment longer, but opened the door, and runned to his room as fast as the stairs would carry him; while Stanley put his trotters on the winder-sill, and watched the liddle sparrers as they played in the street.
There now, it waun’t long before the old chap was down again, staring at nothing, and clenching his hands so that the knuckles gleamed.
‘Wheer be my g-golden coin?’ he whispered. ‘Lawk-a-mussy-me, oh wheer be my g-golden coin?’
‘What golden coin?’ asked the liddle pig.
‘Oh, Stanley, Stanley, wheer by my g-golden coin?’
‘Which coin be that?’ asked the liddle pig.
Yet nothing else would the old man say, but now and again he moaned a bit, and give out a real sniffle, for he was very upset and had clean forgotten to git his pockethankercher. So Stanley took a turn in the garden, saying to hisself how the fresh air would do him a power of good. There he went snuffing the snowdrops and the pretty coloured crocuses, and reading out the linen labels that the old man had tied upon sticks; and when at last he had come to the far end, with its row of tall trees and the empty sty where his mother had reared him, he shook his head, and for ten whole minutes walked like an undertaker, to and thro’, to and thro’, beneath the wintry branches.
Now, that was market day at Arundel; but this here worriting had put it clean out of Mr Bidmead’s mind. ‘Eh, by Job!’ he hollered, all of a sudden. And with that, the old man began to put on his gaiters at a hem of a rate, and to call hisself all the lamentable hard names that he could think of. So it happened that by the time the liddle pig had wandered back to the house, Mr Bidmead was hurrying down Slindon Hill on his way to Arundel, to attend the sale of Mr Hutchinson’s relations. Well, it waun’t very long before Stanley guessed what was in the wind, so he fetched a paper, and set down in Mr Bidmead’s chair in the parlour, and spent his time figgering out the state of the pig market; but when Mr Bidmead came home in the twilight, twitching his hands with excitement, and pulling in his lips so far that you couldn’t see um, never a word did the old feller say, no, never one word, about the wunnerful prices that the hogs had fetched.
‘I be middlin’ rich,’ he thought to hisself, ‘I be middlin’ rich.’
That night he spoke again to Stanley Hutchinson about the missing coin, and the liddle pig went hunting all over the house to find where it had got to: ‘ ’Tis hem strange, wheer it can a’ got to.’ the pig murmured, nosing around. But Mr Bidmead kept on thinking: ‘I be middlin’ rich . . . I be middlin’ rich . . .’ Then he forgot how happy he was, and fretted like a miser for the lost coin.
III
So the week went by; and although the weather suddenly changed, and early spring came to the beech woods of Slindon, there was always a nip in the evening air, when Mr Bidmead, leaning forrard, throwed another log on to the fire, and Mr Hutchinson, leaning backard, watched in the flames the sparkle of his mother’s eyes; and sometimes Stanley would let on to hisself that he could hear the sow’s soft trotters in the room; and once he heard her gulp the golden coin, at a single swaller, without as much as a ‘How did ye come by it, Stan?’
One morning, when Mr Bidmead was out faggoting, the postman handed in a parcel, and the liddle pig opened it, being it was urgent. And by Job, there lay the golden coin, wrapped in a letter, and placed in a box; and the letter came from a butcher over in Parham, telling Mr Bidmead how he’d found the sovereign in the sow’s innards.
Now, Stanley waun’t prepared for th
is; and first thing he done, he thought how silly the whole thing was, and how he’d better keep the coin for hisself, like, and burn the letter straightaway. And then he thought how glad Mr Bidmead would be to see that coin back again, and all his worritings over. So he took it up to the old man’s bedroom, and put it into the drawer: and there it lay, and there it shone and sparkled, until the liddle pig fancied that there waun’t a thing to equal it but the sparkle of his mother’s eyes. And then he thought how suspicious the old man would be, finding it back in the drawer again; all this time the coin was winking, and suddenly he thought how much he’d like to swaller it. And then his eddication got the better of him, and he thought how he’d give it a liddle lick; so he give it a liddle lick; and at that moment, by Job, who did he hear on the stairs but Mr Bidmead. With that, he wrapped the sovereign in a hankercher, and took it across to his room; and there he blowed his snout, and there he blowed it, and when he blowed his snout the second time he swallered the golden coin.
So there it was; and that evening, when he had torn up the letter, and he and Mr Bidmead were playing cribbage, his wits went wandering, to think how that coin would be his for evermore. ‘Your play, Stan,’ said the pig’s old friend. Coming out of his day-dream, the pig played a card; then he gazed into the fire, the fire put out its tongue at him, and young Hutchinson laughed.
***
For a long time after he’d swallered the golden coin, Stanley Hutchinson did nothing but wink to hisself all day and half the night. Then the weather became warmer, and in the evenings he and Mr Bidmead used to chat and laugh together over a fire that waun’t as big as it used to be in the winter-time: and whether it was for this reason, I don’t rightly know, but although he blinked, and peered, and listened as hard as ever he could, the liddle pig waun’t able to see the sparkle of his mother’s eye no longer, or to hear the voice that had always seemed to grunt so favourable at the things he’d done. It is said, too, that the whole of the room began to rock a liddle behind his back, and that the old clock ticked its way clean into the middle of Stanley Hutchinson’s soul. Later still, when spring began to change to summer, and the old man used to let the fire burn out entirely after the cooking was over, the dark chimbley did seem to be lighted up by a red glow of firelight, surelye: but the pig knowed how it waun’t that at all, no fear, it was the golden coin that lay winking and burning in his innards.
Written With My Left Hand Page 4